The Caversham Project
The Caversham Project was a research project initiated in the mid-1970s by Erik Olssen and Tom Brooking of the Department of History at Otago University. The study gathered data on adults living in Caversham and other southern suburbs of Dunedin, New Zealand from 1893–1940 to explore the development of modern New Zealand urban society. Caversham and the other suburbs were chosen because at the time they were one of the largest industrial districts in New Zealand. The project was carried out in several phases: investigating social and geographical mobility, the analysis of paid work, and gender and social structure. The project was funded initially by the University of Otago and later by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology. Publications analysing the data have been produced after the project ceased. Jock Phillips noted in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, that the project "pioneered serious labour history......on a large database of information about Caversham in South Dunedin for important books analyzing work and social hierarchy."
Origins and establishment
The project was said to have originated from a debate within academia about the significance of social class in New Zealand's history "designed to analyze the relevance of class by systematically measuring the extent of social and geographic mobility in Caversham borough". The streets comprising the Caversham Borough were chosen as the study area, because the adult population could be largely reconstructed from electoral rolls and the Census-reported population totals, and the borough contained "an approximate microcosm of the larger urban occupational and class structure." From 1975 until 1901, Olssen was Principal Investigator.In 1995 the project received considerable funding from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, and with the appointment of Hamish James as a full-time Research Assistant, the data was able to be managed electronically. Building the New World: work, politics and society in Caversham, 1880s–1920s , assembled further background information about the project and began an interpretation of the data, clarifying that a specific aim of the project was to investigate how "work in the skilled trades, politics and society" were related and how the themes of the 'social laboratory'—equality, independence, security and opportunity—were achieved by working men and women in their workplaces." The publication also defined what "skilled' work was and showed that between 1902 and 1922 "skilled men dominated Caversham".
The nine-level occupational classification used in the project was based on several working papers, later summarised in Class and Occupation The New Zealand Reality, and Melanie Nolan unpacked the nine identified occupational classes as: large employers, professionals, semi-professionals, small employers and the self-employed, officials and supervisors, white-collar, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled. Comparing some of the data from Caversham with the national profile was hindered by issues such as ambiguous names for various occupations, however the researchers showed similarities between occupational structures at the national and local levels, evident for each of the nine occupations studied within the Caversham Project.
Managing issues with the database
The first stage of the project was to create a statistical database of all adults who lived in the suburb. Because The Caversham Project was forced initially to rely on street directories and electoral rolls, the project, of necessity, had to engage with a local community, rather than a national sample. Focusing on a particular local community – the normal American approach – resulted in several problems. It was difficult to ascertain if the occupational structure in Caversham was typical of New Zealand in general and the extent to which the social–occupational structure in urban New Zealand was comparable to those in other capitalist-industrial societies. This was further complicated because the national occupational structure could only be reconstructed from Census data for the study period. Unfortunately all the census returns had been destroyed so it was necessary to rely on data that had been organised to answer different questions without regard to any variations within regions, or how these might be related regional to "national occupational structures and the larger international division of labour." The position was taken therefore, that "local case studies are the only viable way of identifying occupational structure and mobility in New Zealand".Criminologist Greg Newbold noted that this approach "work mobility, geographical movement and residential differentiation in South Dunedin, and to find out how typical this area was in comparison with the national structure."An audit of the database in 1986 showed it to have many errors and in 1988, using the corrected data, Judi Boyd and Olssen wrote the first systematic study of mobility, The Skilled Workers: Journeymen and Masters in Caversham, 1880–1914 in the New Zealand Journal of History. There were also challenges involved in creating a statistical database of all adults who lived in the suburb. This made it difficult to ascertain if the occupational structure in Caversham was typical of New Zealand in general, and the extent to which the social–occupational structure in urban New Zealand was comparable to those in other capitalist-industrial societies. Nevertheless, the researchers concluded that local case studies could identify occupational structure and mobility in New Zealand, a position also supported by Newbold.
Key areas of focus
Social and geographical mobility
In An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society, 1880–1940 , the fourth book published by the Caversham Project, it was noted in the preface that the work marked a return to the project's key objective: the identification of the extent of both work life and inter-generational occupational mobility; the relationship between levels of mobility and political behaviour; and mobility’s larger social significance. The authors showed that high mobility did not necessarily mean "weak class boundaries, a reduced possibility for class consciousness......a lower likelihood of class-based political action". Olssen et al noted that the brief of the book was to determine the nature of a capitalist structure in New Zealand and to compare whether it was "more or less open than urban societies in Britain or the United States......to test the widespread belief that class-based political systems could emerge only in relatively rigid societies." The authors brought together the data from the Cavendish Project – which now included the three southern boroughs – and showed how social structure and mobility were determined by marital mobility, how men and women chose spouses, occupational pathways followed by men, intergenerational mobility and the expansion of occupational opportunities. The final chapter returned to the question of whether Dunedin was a special place, and if so, what patterns could explain this. The conclusion was that the town had some typical features of industrial capitalism modified by the handicraft sector which had arisen because of a small and scattered population. This was said to have resulted in "narrowing the distance from the social floor to the ceiling......shortages of labour pay differentials for skills among manual workers", allowing the authors to justify calling Dunedin an "accidental utopia" because nobody intended for there to be a small population with limited resources "recognized the way in which such factors allowed people to create a congenial society."In his review of the book, Jim McAloon from Victoria University of Wellington agreed that the relationship between social mobility and class was a major sociological debate and acknowledged the authors' view that a case study such as the Caversham Project can show the interrelated nature of class, gender and race in developing a frame of reference which allows valid contributions to the discourse. McAloon saw the strength of the book as "its rigorous demonstration that...South Dunedin was, therefore, a more open society than Britain, and by extension the same is true of the rest of settler New Zealand; marriage was relatively open, so were occupational choices, and the upper and middle classes constantly refreshed themselves." Sociologist Peter Davis described the book as ambitious in using "detailed historical and quantitative analysis of information" from the Caversham Project "develop an argument about the social structure and urban expression of a new settler society." Davis asserted that it was legitimate for the book to take a structuralist approach that used "conceptual and empirical tools" and suggested that such a model could be applied to larger cities such as Auckland "our understanding of the modern and post-modern New Zealand in its vibrant, structural and cultural complexity." Writing in the Otago Daily Times one reviewer noted "approach their work like a scientific experiment, complete with graphs and tabulations, knowing full well that in science there are no final answers, only workable hypotheses supported by the best available evidence...... a sort of conclusion does emerge....it is clear that social class was and is important in New Zealand history.
Building Attachment in Families, a 2011 funded project managed by the Centre for Research, Evaluation and Social Assessment, had the goal of identifying "the mechanisms, processes and relations required to build and sustain community and family wellbeing, optimize attachment in changing communities and address problems arising out of transience and residential mobility". The project addressed a lack of theorizing on geographical mobility by using data from the Caversham Project. The resulting research confirmed high levels of fluidity of population within the suburb, including movement to neighbouring areas as the "older parts of Caversham and South Dunedin became congested by New Zealand standards......to fluidity of urban society in New Zealand." The importance of children being able to negotiate class differences, said by Pitirim Sorokin as likely to build "intellectual vitality and cultural innovation", underpinned in Dunedin "the emergence of an egalitarian society characterized by a deepening consensus about the importance of looking after those who, for whatever reason, could not always look after themselves......to a vibrant and dynamic society."